The release of the newest frontier AI models marks a turning point for cybersecurity. Palo Alto Networks has conducted early testing of the latest frontier AI models, including Anthropic’s Mythos model as part of Project Glasswing and OpenAI’s latest models as part of Trusted Access for Cyber program. The conclusion is clear: They are extraordinarily capable at finding vulnerabilities and generating corresponding exploits.
This generational improvement in coding ability directly translates to a significant advance in vulnerability discovery and exploit generation. These capabilities, however guardrailed, will not stay contained. Similar advances will appear across other major AI labs, Chinese models, and open source models. Attackers will find the seams in those guardrails. They will use advanced AI to discover zero-day vulnerabilities at scale, generate exploits in near real time, and develop autonomous attack agents unlike anything the industry has faced.
Within six months, advanced AI models with deep cybersecurity capabilities will become commonplace. Organizations that have not put appropriate safeguards in place will face an entirely new class of risk across their enterprise and critical infrastructure.
Frontier AI: A Quantum Leap in Code Fluency
As you have probably already seen, the latest unbounded models like Mythos represent roughly a 50% improvement in coding efficiency over Anthropic’s previous leading model. Palo Alto Networks has had early access unbounded models and we’ve been able to leverage this vast improvement in coding to a quantum leap in scanning and offensive capability.
Hundreds of our best security engineers have been assessing these capabilities and developing best practices for using it effectively. The results revealed several core truths:
- Vulnerability discovery at scale: Frontier AI is exceptionally effective at identifying vulnerabilities in code. In less than three weeks, it accomplished the equivalent of a full year’s worth of penetration testing effort.
- Attack path determination: Perhaps more impressive than finding individual vulnerabilities, Frontier AI excels at vulnerability chaining, combining multiple lower-severity issues into critical-level exploit paths. For example, linking two medium-severity and one low-severity vulnerability into a single critical exploit.
- Full-stack logic analysis: Frontier AI can analyze the full exposure surface of applications, including SaaS and public-facing platforms, identifying logic-based vulnerabilities that traditional tools miss.
Impacts on the Cyber Landscape
Attackers have been using LLMs for years, but based on our testing of frontier AI models, there are three key areas where they will have a significant impact on the cybersecurity landscape:
- The Vulnerability Deluge: Frontier AI models will dramatically accelerate the rate at which vulnerabilities are discovered, by defenders and attackers alike. This will be particularly acute in open source and critically, the flood of patches that follows will itself create risk. Every patch that is not applied immediately becomes a known, targetable vulnerability. Organizations will need to accelerate and automate their patching programs, rethink how they prioritize and apply patches, and ensure best-in-class protections are in place to mitigate vulnerability until they can be remediated.
- Rise of Inside-Out Attacks: Recent supply chain attacks on tools like LiteLLM and Trivy demonstrate a growing pattern where attacks land adversaries inside an organization’s infrastructure, bypassing multiple conventional attack steps and reducing the number of prevention opportunities available to defenders. The rapid deployment of AI infrastructure has made this problem more acute as the AI supply chain, including runtime environments, communication infrastructure, and model dependencies, is often insufficiently protected. While open source usage and patching practices must become significantly more robust, organizations will need structural containment of potential attacks through zero trust, identity modernization, outbound connection restrictions and lateral movement protections.
- Faster AI-Assisted Attack Cycles: I expect the most consequential shift with frontier AI models is the move from AI-assisted to AI-driven attacks. Attackers will build autonomous attack agents that dramatically compress attack cycle times. What once took days or weeks of skilled manual effort will soon be executed in minutes. This democratization of advanced attack capabilities means that defenders must match that speed with near-real-time detection and response, which is only possible with extensive AI and automation throughout security operations. Organizations whose Mean Time to Detection and Mean Time to Response are not measured in low single-digit minutes will be outpaced.
The Defenders Guide: Assessment, Protection, Platformization
The framework for defending against AI-driven threats is not completely new, but the standard for execution must be absolute. Organizations that are “mostly protected” are effectively unprotected. What follows is a phased approach – assessment, protection and platformization – that organizations should pursue in parallel to close gaps before attackers exploit them.
Assessment: Every organization should use the latest AI models to assess its entire code and application landscape and build a comprehensive asset and exposure inventory.
Key priorities:
- Leverage AI models to identify vulnerabilities across your codebase, applications and infrastructure before attackers do.
- Evaluate exposure with full context, including how vulnerabilities chain together to form critical exploit paths.
- Audit your open source supply chain, including AI infrastructure, runtime environments and model dependencies.
- Map your current sensor coverage. Detection, prevention and telemetry gaps represent critical blind spots.
Protect & Remediation: Remediating and reducing exposure is table-stakes. What in the past may have been difficult due to cross-organizational friction of finding and fixing at pace should now be accelerated with the c-suite attention of these new AI models. But this must go further and extend to comprehensive deployment of best-in-class attack prevention capabilities where the new standard is 100% coverage and optimization.
- XDR everywhere, with emphasis on real-time ML-based detection and prevention of attacks; all hosts on prem and cloud included.
- Agentic endpoint security to secure wide-scale adoption of vibe coding and AI security across the enterprise (e.g. Prisma AIRS and our recent acquisition of Koi is now a necessity for securing the agentic endpoint).
- With an average of 85% of work now happening in the browser, secure enterprise browsers with real-time security become a must-have for attack prevention.
- Zero trust and identity security are foundational to securing every user and every connection.
Real-Time Security Operations: With attack cycle times shrinking rapidly, the legacy approach to security operations simply doesn’t work. Disparate tools analyzing data in silos overlaid with manual processes must be replaced with AI and automation throughout. Cortex XSIAM, our AI-driven SOC platform, is what I consider to be the gold standard for how to take a next-generation approach to deliver MTTD and MTTR in single digit minutes.
- Attack detections must be AI/ML driven to detect even frequently-changing and novel attacks at scale.
- These AI detections must operate against a wide range of 1st party and 3rd party data sources – a best in class AI SOC must operate on ALL relevant data sources.
- Automation both natively integrated and throughout the SOC lifecycle is necessary to achieve single digit MTTR; this automation will increasingly be agentic.
- This must be delivered as a platform to remove the seams and gaps between point solutions.
We’re Here to Help
Achieving this level of resilience requires the right platforms and the right expertise.
To help you navigate this shift, we are introducing Unit 42 Frontier AI Defense. This new offering is designed to discover and remediate your current exposure before attackers do, strengthen controls that reduce exposure and contain impact and modernize operations so teams can detect and respond at machine speed.
This is the moment we’ve been preparing for. The threat has never been more sophisticated, but the path forward has never been clearer, and we’re here to partner with you on what comes next.
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